Amanda knox tells of prison abuse, Speaks out on murder in new memoir

Amanda knox tells of prison abuse, Speaks out on murder in new memoir

In a book due out at the end of the month, the woman convicted of murdering her roommate opens up on the mistreatment she suffered while incarcerated, unfair treatment at the hands of authorities and what happened on the night of the crime

While imprisoned in Italy for four years for the murder of her roommate, Amanda Knox fended off sexual harassment from guards and an overture from a cellmate. On the night of the killing, she was smoking marijuana and watching a movie with her Italian boyfriend. And those infamous cartwheels that she reportedly performed in the police station never happened.

GRIM OUTLOOK: Amanda Knox arriving at the tribunal for sentencing after she was convicted of murdering her roommate in 2007.

These assertions are among the many in Waiting to Be Heard, the long-awaited memoir that is Ms Knox's most extensive public testimony since she was convicted, and then acquitted, of killing her 21-year-old British roommate, Meredith Kercher.

''Until now I have personally never contributed to any public discussion of the case or of what happened to me,'' the 25 year old writes in an author's note at the end of the book. ''While I was incarcerated, my attention was focused on the trial and the day-to-day challenges of life in prison. Now that I am free, I've finally found myself in a position to respond to everyone's questions. This memoir is about setting the record straight.''

On the morning of Nov 2, 2007, Kercher was found semi-naked, her throat slit, wrapped in a duvet and left in her bedroom in their villa in the picturesque town of Perugia. Ms Knox, a college student from Seattle who was spending her junior year abroad, and her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, were accused by Italian prosecutors of killing Kercher in a sexual escapade gone wrong. Also charged was Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast native, who was eventually convicted of sexual assault and murder, and is now serving a 16-year prison term.

The prosecution maintained the murder weapon was a large knife taken from Mr Sollecito's house. The knife matched the wounds on Kercher's body and had traces of Kercher's DNA on the blade and Ms Knox's DNA on the handle, they said.

However, Ms Knox's defence team insisted she was innocent and had been forced to say things she didn't mean during a lengthy police interrogation. They also said bumbling Italian police contaminated the crime scene, producing flawed DNA evidence.

Two years after the original conviction, an appeals court acquitted Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito, and they were released. But in March, Italy's highest court overturned that decision, ordering a new trial sometime in the next year.

In a recent interview with People magazine, Knox said she is sometimes ''paralysed'' with anxiety stemming from the death of her roommate and the legal proceedings that followed.

''When Meredith was murdered and I was arrested, it was so shocking. It was paralysing. Everything toppled,'' she said. Since returning to the United States in 2011, Ms Knox has largely avoided the public spotlight and is mostly left alone in her Pacific Northwest hometown. She said she is still dealing with difficult emotions.

''Things creep up on me and all of a sudden I'm overwhelmed by the feeling of helplessness and that desperation and fear to even hope,'' she said.

Despite the high court ruling, Italian law cannot compel Ms Knox to return for the trial, and family spokesman David Marriott has said it's doubtful she will go to Italy.

Waiting to Be Heard, which is scheduled for release on April 30, prompted a highly competitive auction early last year, at the end of which Ms Knox is reported to have received a US$4 million (115 million baht) advance from HarperCollins. Publishers were convinced that the intense publicity the case received, with its lurid details and the courtroom spectacle of two Italian trials, would make the book a big seller.

In 463 pages, Ms Knox recounts her darkest moments in prison _ at one point, she writes, she imagined committing suicide by suffocating herself with a garbage bag _ as well as her routines there. She says she practised Italian, wrote letters to family and friends and read books by Dostoyevsky and Umberto Eco.

The book exhaustively lays out her defence, describing her whereabouts on the night her roommate was killed. She says she and Mr Sollecito were smoking marijuana, reading a Harry Potter book aloud in German and watching the film Amelie at his apartment. (''Around our house, marijuana was as common as pasta,'' she writes, recalling that one of her roommates had taught her how to roll a joint properly.)

She points also to the Italian prosecutors who she said willfully ignored and manipulated evidence while they clung to the theory that she and Mr Sollecito were responsible for Kercher's death. A conversation with her mother from prison was distorted to help place her at the scene of the crime and promptly leaked to a British newspaper, she writes.

According to Ms Knox's account, the police interrogated her for hours and sporadically slapped her on the back of her head. Her requests to use the bathroom were denied. Eventually they goaded her into signing a statement that implicated herself and an innocent man, Patrick Lumumba, her boss at a bar where she worked.

Confused and panicking after being taken to prison, Ms Knox asked to make a phone call. ''The guard looked at me like I'd asked for caviar and prosecco,'' she writes.

But the book also reveals that Ms Knox believes her own mistakes contributed to her conviction. She admits to being naive, sometimes inappropriate and odd, too proud to admit when her halting knowledge of Italian failed her. During the investigation, she followed the directions of the Italian police ''like a lost, pathetic child,'' she recalls.

In one highly publicised incident that the author discusses in the book, after the body of Kercher was discovered in her bedroom, Ms Knox stood outside the villa and repeatedly kissed Mr Sollecito, drawing suspicion from the police. ''Later, people would say that our kisses were flirtatious _ evidence of our guilt,'' she writes.

Book publishers who met with Ms Knox last year said they were dazzled by her charm, intelligence and forthright demeanour. Though whether she can win over the book-buying public remains to be seen.

Will she come across as an innocent abroad, a naive college student ensnared by a medieval Italian legal system? Or, as she has been portrayed in the Italian and British press, a cunning seductress who engineered the brutal killing of her roommate?

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